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Vendors peddle everything from vegetables to electronics in Mexico City markets.
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story and photos by Bennett Barthelemy
On Valentine’s Day, I said goodbye to Mexico.
I did not have to pay $2,400 to cross to the United States with falsified papers — as Avecita did — simply to work washing dishes in an Arcata fast-food restaurant. Her degree as a medical technician brought her just a few days a month of work in the Oaxaca hospitals.
I will never have to protect myself from brutal and dishonest coyotes at the border. I will never spend 10 days lost in the Arizona desert and run out of food and water, ill prepared for the elements as Celia was on her crossing last year.
I am sure my kids will get more than six years of education and will not have to work full time at age 12 to support the family as my Mexican girlfriend’s father did, which necessitated his border hopping.
These are all problems I want far away from my world. I thought I could hide a thousand miles from the border and pretend that such adversity could never touch my life or my heart. Now, safely hidden in the haven of Arcata, I could transport Mexico and all its problems far away — back across the border where they belong. I would be content turning a blind eye to the 1,951-mile arbitrary line drawn with razor wire across the dirt of a continent.
A few days after realizing these things, I was at the last place I wanted to be. I was at the Shell station at the Otay border crossing on the United States side, waiting to buy Mexican car insurance. I watched for La Migra (immigration), a presence that permeated from the fast food and strip-mall existence of Otay, which quickly gave way to vast patchworks of agriculture.
The magnetic pull of the north on the south was strong when the economy was booming in America, and it was weak when it wasn’t. If one were to graph the booms in the U.S. economy with the influx of immigrants, the numbers would rise together — while the borders responded by loosening up — and then fall together as the economy would slump — signaled by massive immigration sweeps and deportations while the borders tighten.
Guns, uniforms and government vans waiting to be loaded with illegal cargo now surrounded me. These men and women worked ceaselessly to disrupt the inevitable flow of labor from south to north. They worked to disrupt people chasing after a living at the fringe of existence. I could have been trafficking heroin or I could have been a coyote smuggling human freight to sweatshops in Los Angeles. What was I doing? I was taking Norma, an illegal, back to Mexico.
I was fixing the mistake of a lazy border guard who neglected to affix the proper stamp and paper to my girlfriend’s passport the previous month. Sure her Mexican passport was valid — meaning she could jump borders. But with each crossing, she was required to get a tourist visa (an I-94), which started the clock ticking for a maximum three-month visit.
She could have been in the states for years as far as the government knew — since it had no record of her crossing without an I-94. Our plans to marry later in the spring hit a big snag when we read the immigration forms that would allow her residency. The I-94 was required to begin the process if the spouse-to-be was already in the states. Otherwise, she would have to face deportation for one year while the immigration department decided her case. I realized then that I had to smuggle her back to Mexico.
As I waited in line for Mexican car insurance, I thought how silly it was to think that I would need it — since our journey south of the border could easily be measured in feet. I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see an uniformed officer escorting Norma from my Volkswagen Fox.
“So close, so close,” I told myself. I longed to be back in liberal Arcata and away from this militarized zone, which Time magazine reported battled 40,000 immigrant crossers daily.
Norma and I were going out on our first date. I was afraid. She was exceptionally pretty, but that was not where my fear came from. She was an alien — from a different culture, a different educational background and social class. Perhaps scariest of all, she was Catholic. All this left me aloof and guarded. Yet, I was intensely attracted to her because of our extreme differences. She refused to let me pay for her coffee. And as she took out her wallet, I saw a stack of $20 bills.
“You should be taking me to dinner,” I joked.
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Numerous religious stores line the streets of predominantly-Catholic Mexico City.
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Shyly, she admitted, “I must always have $100 in my wallet in case La Migra picks me up. That way I can be safe in a Tijuana hotel while I wait for someone to come get me.”
As the months went by and we grew closer, it became harder and harder for me to think that one day, she might not be at home when I returned from my weekly trips doing outdoor education.
Just a few days before the new millennium was to dawn, Norma and I packed suitcases, and we found ourselves heading over the border again — this time jet-bound for Mexico City. The idea was to spend some time with her family and in her hometown of Ojo de Agua, located at the fringe of the city, because it would not be possible for her to leave the country while the immigration department handled her case for residency.
This would likely take the better part of two years and over $2,000 in processing fees for all of the government forms that had to be sent at the exact times and with no mistakes. If not the case would be shifted to the bottom of the mountainous stack, adding months or years to the process of naturalization.
The plane bucked and shuddered for one of the roughest flights imaginable. Sober but drunk with anxiety, I imagined flack bursts of dark powder around paper wings as the pilot dipped and rose to avoid the onslaught. The in-flight movie, “Clear and Present Danger,” was filled with fiery explosions and Latin drug lords fighting covert U.S. military operatives. At last, the plane banked hard over the immense city.
Mexico City’s broad streets radiated outward like a great Aztec sun set in stone. I saw the pale green center known as Bosque de Chapultepec, the lungs of La Ciudad working hard in the sputter of 10 million crawling vehicles.
The sun faded to a salute of steel dagger skyscrapers — a crimson shimmer before the promise of night. I flowed through customs, despite my initial apprehension, and kept hold of my wallet through the airport until we arrived at my new sanctuary: the locked doors of the Gutierrez family car.
Norma’s family lived one hour from La Ciudad. What struck me first was the legions of morose-looking statues emerging from the noisy dusk, which gave the effect that we were touring a great cemetery. Roadside altars of La Virgen de Guadalupe had sprung up where the final exit had been made by the unlucky traveler. At each virgen we passed, the driver, her brother Fernando, kissed the crucifix hanging on the mirror, and the sign of the cross was made by all in the car but me.
I was seeing a culture in transit, which must now sustain itself with the city and sustenance miles away from the pueblo. I was riding thin arteries that build pressure daily, weekly, yearly … almost exponentially, it would seem. We crept along like hurried shadows, where the life of the pueblo is being eclipsed by a reverberating, deafening pulse that feeds the enlarged heart of Mexico City.
The commute from these border shanties to La Ciudad is no different than the commute from Nuevo Leon to Dallas or from Tijuana to San Diego. The time it takes to get there and the looming question of skin tone and legal papers is the only difference beyond the new lines that delineate Estado De Mexico — where Non-na’s family lives — and the border between the United States and Mexico.
That day, I saw a world of poverty, people and pollution — something that was not my own, something I could never claim. Yet knew I had to claim it. After all, a border is no more than an idea — a belief waiting to be pushed out of favor and then subverted.
Once behind the pastel peach and white walls of the Gutierrez casa, I would spend a portion of my day reading travel guides to places I would never get to. The family could not afford to take me everywhere I dreamed of going, with the expensive gas and exorbitant toll roads that had to be followed.
In the hazy light of the manicured back yard, with its neatly cropped grass and fragrant rose bushes, I did my best to occupy myself while the family cooked and chatted together. I tried to take in all I could of this new slice of universe I now found myself anchored to. The black and white diamonds of swept tile gave an illusion of private space.
One lazy afternoon, Norma’s father Lazaro spoke proudly to me of how he had been the first to build a house here almost 20 years ago. He sold the rest of his inheritance, which a decade before had been cornfields. Now it was a distant memory of the land-cooperative ejido system, a time when communities were in charge of their land and divided it out for small farms. Slowly, the neighborhood of Los Arcos took shape in the looming immensity of La Ciudad, which was now just a few minutes drive down the toll road to the west — just a few years from merging.
I often saw women sweating in the chill of dawn. They pushed their carts with a smoking cauldrons of oil for tlacoyos and sopes, the tent stacked on top, to be set up at the tianguis, the outdoor market. Rainbows of clothes were left swimming in the wind to dry on the roofs of nearly all the stacked houses that jumbled outward in all directions as far as the eye could see. They reminded me of schools of tropical fish in a sea of gray cement blocks, with wiggling re-bar as seaweed jutting from the roofs waiting to take on another level, always room to build up.
Several times, I climbed to the top of the second-story roof to pretend I could see through the soiled gauze of a sky. My gaze burned through the dust and the spew of power plants to the snowfields of Ixtacihautl, which lies 70 miles south.
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A Street performer juggles fruit in Guadalajara.
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From my perch in the clouds, I tried to imagine what it was like for Norma, a skinny but tough little girl with her belly hungry much of the time for physical and emotional sustenance. I tried to see the past in the opaque haze of afternoon from the family roof. I saw rolling blackouts, water and vegetables they would never eat without boiling or treating with iodine, the cistern that would fill ever so slowly with the fetid water.
I see her mother, Luz Maria, working night and day jobs — commuting by bus two hours to La Ciudad to feed her family. I see her father, Lazaro packing to leave his family to stay nine months of the year in Southern California to work crushing rock or landscaping million-dollar homes. I was still a world apart. Nothing in my experience could even come close to knowing this kind of existence. Yet, I could not hide behind my North Face jacket, my Vuarnet sunglasses and blond hair.
My whole understanding until then was locked inside my private car, my private heart, my people-less wilderness, my empty highways and my ever-full stomach. I felt forever marked. No matter how hard I tried, I could not paint myself into this new scenery, this new wilderness. I found myself wanting a potent emetic, something to relieve myself of my trappings, my history and my legacy.
Now we are in Arcata. Norma and I recently had our interview with the immigration department in Los Angeles. She is now a “conditional resident” and no longer a “resident alien.” In another year, we must return to prove again that we live together, surrender photos, forms and money, tax statements, and submit to more interrogation to shed the conditional part of her status. I asked Norma if she wanted to become a U.S. citizen, which she will one day be eligible for.
“No” she replied easily. “I love Mexico, we have true freedom there. What my family lacks in money, they make up for it by being close. Mexico is the place of my heart.”
She said that someday we will have a home in Guadalajara — close to her parents — and one in Southern California — close to my parents. We won’t be simply American and Mexican. We will be both. Maybe then, the borders will begin to exist as bridges that connect, and they will no longer be fences of steel and wire that separate.
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